It’s almost impossible to catalogue all the ways men are oppressed by women in contemporary gynocratic society. There are so many! For example, did you know that men are oppressed by female characters in video games? I know, right? The last bastion of red-blooded manliness, invaded by imaginary ladies!
Luckily, the fellows at MGTOWforums.com are on the case, exposing this foul virtual misandry. I Am started off a recent discussion on the subject by asking
WTF is with empowered women in video games now? …
I see a new trend in the video/computer game world and that is the increase in strong playable female characters.
Now, I am no hardcore gamer but I do play computer games often and the recent one I have been playing recently is Shogun 2 total war. Now for those who don’t know what this game is, it is a strategy game based on the military of feudal Japan. I recently bought an upgrade for the game the other day and guess what one of the strongest military units was? Nuns. I shit you not. The nuns had an attack 20% -40% higher than most units in the game. Somehow I doubt that in real life a nun would have swung a sword or used a spear faster and harder than a feudal warlord, and this game was based on history.
Clearly nuns are incapable of manlike swordplay, though it is true that they are capable reenacting famous internet panda sneeze videos. (I have seen video proof of this.) But Shogun 2 does not depict them sneezing like pandas. It depicts them fighting.
This is an outrage because video games are meant to be a perfectly accurate reflection of reality. Obviously there is nothing even slightly unrealistic about any of this:
Most of us dudes are in fact capable of karate-chopping heads in two. We just don’t like to show off all the time.
I think I have the right to ask steam and other gaming companes: WTF with the subliminal brainwashing? What now when I buy or play a game women will be doing all the ass kicking? …
I call bullshit on this subject. Video games are the last place for guys to hang out and now women are taking over. Why not just save us the trouble and instead of eliminating our fantasy world just throw us in work camp to provide for thier bastard children (literally speaking) while they shit all over us…wait they already do that.
I Am is not the only dude who’s noticed this alarming femtrend. Goldenfetus added his observations:
I’ve noticed this too, and it drives me insane. Was co-oping Gears 3 last month and there’s a point where 2nd player has to take over a female character. Almost ruined the game for me. It may seem minor, but once you’re aware of this type of brainwashing it’s impossible to ignore. There’s no way a slim female could keep up with the massive battle-hardened male Gears in that kind of environment. They would be a liability as they are in real life combat.
Exactly! By contrast, the male characters in Gears of War 3 are all completely accurate representations of real-world men.
Goldenfetus continued:
You’ll see the same thing in most stat-based role-playing games as well, where you have the option of a female player character – like Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, D&D, etc. The women never have any strength or intelligence penalties compared to the males. … They want to give the impression that people of any race, gender, and sexual-orientation are interchangeable – that there are no differences in ability between them, and that only a bigot could think otherwise. I’m sick of it too.
At the very least, female characters should be depicted as carriers of cooties.
Despite the very serious subject matter – video game misandry is never funny! – Xtc tried to lighten the mood with a little humor:
It would be hilarious to portray the female characters realistically. If you chose the female character in your FPS [First Person Shooter] she would have to move very slowly, dragging the gun around. You could build in some extra shake to the crosshairs to represent hopeless accuracy. Every time you needed to reload your gun, instead of just pressing a button, you’d have to find a male character and go through some flirting dialogue options to persuade him to do it for you. One out of every four missions the game would tell you that you were sitting out this one due to ‘women’s issues’.
Calloway, for his part, offered some historical perspective:
This is nothing new. I got heavy into gaming back in the late 90’s and even back then they had Tomb Raider, S.I.N., etc. Even in the original Unreal, you played as a big-breasted female.
I saw a documentary on the making of the original Tomb Raider once. The lead character, Lara Croft, was originally going to be a man. They saw him as an Indiana Jones-type character. Then, one of the designers suggested it be a woman because “if you’re going to be playing a game for hours, you might as well have something good to look at”. …
When you first take the red pill, it’s amazing the things you see. It’s as if you had blinders on before, and all of sudden they’ve been removed, allowing you to actually understand what you’ve been seeing.
Yep. And what you’ve been seeing is Lara Croft’s ass. Lara Croft’s ass oppresses men! The red pill tells me so!
Now we come to the clincher.
When you try to get romantic with the imaginary ladies in video games, they don’t act like Roissy and those dudes say ladies act. I mean, you can’t even neg them! As Dave sadly pointed out:
I remember about 12 years ago playing the Baldur’s Gate rpg series and there were some romance dialog paths between your character and some of the women who could join your group but you had to treat them very nice. You couldn’t give them any attitude or make fun of them otherwise it would be over.
Basically you have to be a total mangina towards women in most games if you want to bed them.
Even imaginary ladies are stuck up bitches!
The horror!
I had a
@Shadow
That they were
“games have always been, up to this day, primarily marketed towards guys” –
Though, the game systems of old did have ads featuring boys and girls playing Mario, etc.
We WERE invited to spend our parents’ money along with the guys, let’s not forget that XD
What I find is that the boundary of “guy” and “girl” games becomes hilariously shifty. Remember when console RPG’s were a respectable dudely pursuit, not “girl stuff like FF?” 😉
Dedicated to DKM!
Ah, remember the good all time and its boys-only games? Tetris, pacman, pong! You could smell the testosterone on these…
David Futrelle–January 11, 2012, @ 5:51 pm:
Yes, chess has the queen, whose power is indeed stronger than the other pieces, but she is committed to using her power specifically as you (the player) wish her to do so, and if you consider the players for each side are personifications of the King (limited powers as a piece, but the game ends when he is captured), the Queen is as beholden to her royal master as any pawn on the board. She–and her power–goes where he want her to go!
She is valued and treasured for her utility to the game and its positions, NOT her power per se.
Also, her power, like the power of all of the other pieces, is dedicated at all times to winning the game for HIS majesty!
The last time I went to a game convention alone was two days of fun. And a bit of adventure, as it involved a place I didn’t know, carpooling with people found on internet and an hour of walking to get there and no idea how I would get back or where to sleep (it end up being a tatami) and having to write pretentious poetry for a Rimbaud Murder Party. Don’t laugh, that was adventure to me.
Apropos of nothing in particular, TURTLE POWER!!
That is all.
Chess: the woman does all the work, the man lies around benefitting from it.
No wonder I never liked playing it.
I’m more into card games myself. My father taught me to play poker and cribbage more successfully than he taught me to play chess, and I cleaned up in pretzels in college (my brother who was in a fraternity got actual money when he played, but my group was all humanities majors and nerds, therefore broke).
I could also drink about half the men I knew under the table in college as well (not actually good given the alcoholism that ran in my family), but it was funny to see them so befuzzled that the liddle girl wasn’t passing out.
Wow.. called it!!!
DKM, it’s poor form to be a predictable troll
Okay, de-lurking again because I just have to ask:
WTF is up with Meller’s incessant need to control women? I know he’s a condescending fop with a lot of unwarranted self-importance, but is his life really so empty that it can’t have meaning unless he has his very own slave? Or maybe he’s just got some sort of processing disorder.
This is totally OT, although somewhat similar to the MGTOW rantings in the OP. The Spearhead asshats have their panties in a bunch because there’s a FEMALE SCIENTIST on the $100 bill in Canada. What misandry!!!! http://www.the-spearhead.com/2012/01/11/canadian-currency-features-feminist-revisionism/
The jackass makes up a whole story about how the bill is saying that she’s the creator of insulin and its all some grand conspiracy to hide the truth of the actual discoverer Frederick Banting. Of course he also conveniently forgets to mention that Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin discovered the structure of insulin and that Rosalyn Sussman Yalow helped discover radioimmunoassay for insulin. She won a nobel prize and so did Dorothy.
They’re pissed if women are depicted in videogames. They’re pissed if women are depicted on money. Anything other than a depiction of a woman naked or barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen is unacceptable to these vermin.
I just watched yesterday’s Castle’s episode and… Holy Fuck it’s about PUAs! I don’t recognize most of the vocabulary but they nailed the attitude. (however, the dozens of girlfriends and thousands of sexual partners: less believable)
DKM: You might be interested in this: http://amzn.to/zBp07B It’s a serious history book about how the queen became the most powerful piece on the board.
@Pyena
I’m not really sure why Meller is the way he is. There are some theories though:
a) If I recall correctly, his wife divorced him after he cheated on her, so that may have something to do with it, although if he was the type to cheat on his spouse he wasn’t that great of a person to begin with;
b) He has a fetish for dolls and/or wants a D/s relationship with a submissive partner, but he’s too lazy/incompetent to actually do something about it, so he wants to make it so that women have no choice but to became his perfect little “dolls”;
c) He’s from a parallel universe where women are slaves and he accidentally got transported to our world and his mental sanity suffered greatly from the shock.
@Myoo
d)He was a human boy raised by dolls
DKM, maybe if you’re an EXTRA good boy, your fairy god mother will come and turn you into a doll.
@Myoo
I dunno. I have a hard time believing that he was ever married. He seems far too selfish to be able to get to that far. I like the “parallel universe” theory better.
@Shadow
XD!
I was so hoping you would cover this article, David!
I’m probably a walking sterotype, but I love simulation games and single player RPGs ( really have no use for MMOs or FPS games – even my Second Life RPGs are text based combat), especially RPGs with interesting scripts. Points if I can romance someone. They’re like my version of crack/romance novels with fighting!
Hey, if those guys are all “Wah! No wimmins in our gamer culture”, they can always opt out of gaming. Or games with female progtags. Or playing a female character. Or anything else a reasonable person would do.
@Shadow
I think you’re onto something, but what if… he’s an actual doll!? *music sting*. Like Pinocchio, but for some reason he never got his own Jimminy Cricket, so he has no conscience.
@Myoo
Nah, if he were a real doll he’d be happy, and probably set himself up a harem a la the krusty doll from that halloween episode (though the krusty doll didn’t have a harem). I think DKM’s built himself up a harem and now stares forlornly at them (whilst cuddling, fondling etc of course), constantly attempting to attain dollhood.
@Shadow
hahaha…with the Malibu Stacy right?
Meller, have you ever considered the drawbacks to your dream woman? I’ve known two women in my life who possessed the traits you claim to desire so much, just be careful what you wish for.
I used to dream of having a husband who would support my staying at home so I could pursue a mastery of embroidery and the many other feminine arts. The I realized the price I’d have to pay for that. Namely, that many of these men would prefer that I be utterly brainless, completely helpless and that they would require more work to maintain than a newborn. So um…no thanks. I’ll keep my feminine, traditionally skilled self occupied at work rather than pursuing my passions. Small price to pay really.
My boyfriend and I went to the range awhile back with an assortment of firearms. The results of this trip were, more or less, that at any given range I outshot him by a significant margin, and also that with a pistol, I outshot myself with a rifle. This measured as group size at any given distance.
On the basis of basic technical facts and gender stereotypes, this makes absolutely no sense — a reversal of all that is good and right, as just as rifles are invariably more accurate than handguns, men shoot better than women. Possibly in the sense that men are invariably capable of operating a firearm in the first place, whereas women generally are not.
It makes a lot more sense, though, when you consider that I have about an intermediate level of experience (and consequently middling skill*) with handguns and extremely limited** experience (and consequently extremely limited skill**) with things not handguns, and that it was my boyfriend’s first time ever shooting anything.
(I let him shoot my hypothetical-carry gun. After two rounds, he decided he wanted no more of that. Which is about what one would usually expect for someone on “lifetime number of rounds 21 and 22”.)
People who are about to assert that the actual issue is that my pathetic ladyarms cannot pick up a rifle, whereas they can pick up a handgun are cordially invited to not render an opinion on the matter of shooting when they obviously have never done it.
Also, fucking LOL at the notion that there’s something about loading a gun, of all things, that is inaccessible to women. It is to die laughing.
* Somewhere between “Can operate the item reliably and has gotten beyond throwing shots off the target entirely” and “wouldn’t be in the bottom of the field at a formal competition”
** Somewhere between “Still can figure out how to put in the bullets (sic) and still does not throw shots entirely off the target” and “Can consistently figure out where the heck one puts one’s face”
Wow. Meller never fails to bring the bizarre to a discussion. Is it bad that, as a scientist, a part of me wants someone to put Meller in a jar for study? He’s just such an unusual specimen.
And, so as not to proclaim complete ninja badassery: The first two rounds I fired out of my great-uncle’s 12-gauge O/U shotgun, I didn’t have it mounted properly before I fired. The next two, more or less the same problem. At that point, having run out of shoulders that were still willing to be anywhere near a stock, I was done with longarms for the day.